A magical journey of a sharp-tongued woman and a goofy man

The morning mist in the training ground was scattered and splashed by the spiritual energy. Ye Shuli stared at the red dot jumping on the monitoring screen, her knuckles turning white from clenching her fists.

Jiang Ye, with half a piece of blood-staining grass dangling from his mouth, leaned closer to the screen, his dark robes brushing against the tattered pages of the training manual on the bluestone slab: "Have your young masters turned the Four-Dimensional Footwork into a folk dance?"

“They altered the core of the formation.” Ye Shuli raised her hand and sliced ​​open the spiritual energy projection. The originally intricate fractal structure had been tampered with into chaotic lines. “The Third Elder’s lineage has been resisting the new training for three months now—three stars are missing from the star map on the glazed tiles.”

Suddenly, a bell rang from the direction of the ancestral hall, and the seven bronze doors opened in response.

The phantom images of the twenty-three elders appeared between the gilded beams and pillars, and the successor mark between Ye Shuli's eyebrows shimmered with an icy blue light.

Ye Mingxuan, the grandson of the Third Elder, leaned against the door frame with his sword in his arms. The nine-headed bird embroidered on his black brocade robe seemed ready to take flight amidst the surge of spiritual energy.

"Are you all aware that the protective barrier for the championship has been upgraded to fourteen-dimensional encryption?" Ye Shuli projected the afterimage of the Kunlun Mirror onto the bronze cauldron, the Klein blue energy stream causing the elders to squint. "If you're still clinging to the ancestral Xuanji Steps..."

"Young Miss, you should first explain why you secretly transferred energy from the quenching pool!" Ye Mingxuan's sword scabbard slammed heavily on the ground, its dark red spiritual energy shattering three blue bricks. "Using the family's lifeline to a wild man forging weapons, is this what you call the responsibility of an heir?"

Jiang Ye suddenly laughed, his fingertips, still damp with hemostatic herb juice, poking at the monitoring screen: "When Young Master Ye sneaked off to Zuixianlou last night, he used a modified teleportation talisman—should I project the pink spiritual energy trajectory from the recording stone for everyone to see?"

The council chamber erupted in an uproar.

Ye Shuli raised her hand and froze Ye Mingxuan's sudden sword light. Ice shards climbed up his face, which was filled with shock and anger: "Since you all question my training plan, everyone will participate in a simulated battle tomorrow at Chenshi (7-9 AM)."

If traditional formations could break through this barrier—"She flicked her finger, deploying a Saint-level protective shield, "I voluntarily resign from my position as successor."

As dusk settled over the training ground, Jiang Ye squatted on the reconstructed defensive fortifications, munching on a candied hawthorn: "Are you really going to let them attack using the Xuanji Steps?"

That thing in fourteen-dimensional space is no different from a tortoise crawling.

"The Third Elder's study contains communication jade slips from rival families." Ye Shuli inserted the modified array flag into the southeast Xun position, and the fragment of the Kunlun Mirror rippled strangely at the array's eye. "The three missing stars on the star map correspond to Tanlang, Jumen, and Lucun—precisely the star positions where the referees of the championship competition are located."

A dark purple communication talisman suddenly ignited within the array, and the scent of canna lilies mixed with distorted handwriting appeared: "It has been confirmed that the Ye family heir's spiritual energy fluctuations are abnormal..." Jiang Ye waved his sleeve and crushed the talisman, and the candied hawthorn skewer precisely nailed to the spying spirit butterfly under the eaves.

At midnight, the quenching pool turned an unnatural scarlet red, and Ye Shuli stroked the newly appeared cracks on the Kunlun Mirror.

The original complete Twenty-Eight Mansions star chart is now slowly emanating black mist from the positions of Tian Shu and Yao Guang.

As thirty-six spiritual energy barriers rose in the training ground, the rising sun shone directly on the newly carved array diagram on the Ye family's ancestral precept stele.

Ye Mingxuan, gripping his ancestral Xuan Iron Array Disc, sneered: "The Xuanji Steps have been passed down for a thousand years; how could your scribbles compare?"

Ye Shuli flicked a bronze coin from her fingertip, and the coin split into hundreds of geometric light spots in the air.

Suddenly, the monitoring screen displayed a three-dimensional coordinate system, dividing the entire training ground into countless rhomboid blocks: "Do you know why the Xuanji Step Technique fails in fourteen-dimensional space?" She stomped on a blue brick, crushing it. "You haven't even mastered three-dimensional coordinate system transformation."

The moment the twenty Ye family disciples formed their battle formation, Ye Shuli unleashed a modified battle flag.

Klein Blue's spiritual energy flow suddenly twisted into a Möbius strip, causing all attacks from traditional formations to fall into an infinite loop.

Jiang Ye, squatting on the spectator platform and munching on a candied hawthorn, shouted, "Hey you on the left, you stepped in the wrong direction on your seventh step!"

"This is impossible!" Ye Mingxuan's sword hummed loudly from the backlash of spiritual energy.

He forcefully activated his ancestral cultivation technique, but the array plate suddenly displayed an overload warning—Ye Shuli had already connected the monitoring system to each array eye, and modern algorithms were frantically analyzing their spiritual energy trajectories.

The afterimage of the Kunlun Mirror suddenly enveloped the entire area, and Ye Shuli switched the battlefield to a four-dimensional projection.

The arrogant young men were horrified to discover that their familiar footwork had turned into a comical marionette dance in the distorted space.

Jiang Ye's shoulders trembled as he suppressed a laugh: "Don't even mention it, this choreography could win first prize at a temple fair."

When the monitoring screen displayed a 100% hacking rate, Ye Mingxuan's brocade robe was already soaked with sweat.

Ye Shuli removed the protective shield and slapped the training manual onto his chest: "The annotations on page seven of the formation were written by your great-grandfather three hundred years ago—even he knew they needed to be adapted to spatial dimensions."

As dusk fell, Jiang Ye wandered to the tavern in the west of the city, where the wind chimes on the eaves were vibrating at an unusual frequency.

The moment the woman in red fell into his arms, he smelled the same canna lily scent as the communication talisman.

"Young master, save me..." The dark patterns on the woman's neck were faintly visible in the twilight.

Jiang Ye suddenly grabbed her wrist: "This tracking spell isn't symmetrical enough." With a flash of spiritual energy at his fingertips, the explosive talisman hidden in her sleeve suddenly turned into a silk flower.

The woman's pupils constricted as she was being seduced, and Jiang Ye shouted at the top of his lungs, "Shopkeeper!"

The girl said she would treat everyone to Zhuyeqing tea! "Taking advantage of the chaos, I grabbed the jade pendant from her waist and swept it—the coordinates of the abandoned altar on the outskirts of the city glowed red on the candied hawthorn stick."

At midnight, the altar ruins glowed with phosphorescent light. As Jiang Ye crouched down and squeezed into the gap in the barrier, the candied hawthorn skewer suddenly emitted a piercing alarm.

Where there should have been an ordinary trap, the reflections of the Twenty-Eight Mansions were suspended, and the positions of Tian Shu and Yao Guang were actually two writhing black mists.

"Shuli!" Jiang Ye crushed the communication jade talisman. "The trap is mixed with the power of Starfall..." Before he could finish speaking, countless spiritual tentacles emerged from the black mist, devouring the candied hawthorn in his hand until not even the bamboo skewer was left.

The monitoring screen in the Ye family ancestral hall was flashing red light wildly. Ye Shuli stared at the suddenly mutated star map. The black mist seeping from the crack in the Kunlun Mirror was perfectly superimposed on the image transmitted by Jiang Ye.

Suddenly, a burst of spiritual energy came from the direction of the training ground—the family formation that should have been corrected was now autonomously generating a strange Klein bottle structure.